


For the Birds

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hauntswitch, Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Aliens, Dammek and Jude definitely have to go on some sort of mystery quest sooner or later, EDIT AFTER PLAYING HIVESWAP:, Forgive Me, I'm not sure I should really post this, M/M, Moirails, OH MY GOD I WAS SO WRONG, OOC, SO SO SO SO WRONG, Stranger in a Strange Land, balancing that thing about Xefros I wrote before, bandmates, because the game hasn't come out yet, but - Freeform, but I'm still excited!!!, pigeons everywhere, this is kinda the other side of the equation, treehouse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 22:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11793180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Jude Harley’s carrier pigeons– the Lone Gunbirds – enjoy perching on Dammek’s horn-antlers.  Dammek isn’t happy with this development.  He is also trapped on an alien planet where things don’t make a lot of sense yet.  People go out during the DAY.  Some weird stuff, guys.(Basically, I decided to try my hand at speculating about Dammek and Jude living together in his treehouse during Hauntswitch, with some Dammek/Xefros palemance feelings mixed in, too.  I hope this is okay…  Sorry again, world.  I tried to do my best with the source material provided so far, but it’ll probably seem hilariously OOC one of these days.  If you read, I really hope you enjoy it now and look back and laugh with me later! :P  Also, I'm sorry I'm kinda spamming the Homestuck tag today...)





	For the Birds

**Author's Note:**

> My best friend CytosineSkald and I played a game where we each wrote the first few lines for a story the other person was gonna finish. So these first few lines were written by her! You can see the story I wrote the first lines for over on her page, if you want. I promise she’s really really great. Her story is about Barbara Gordon!!

Dammek reached an exoskeleton-stiff hand up and waved it near his “antlers” – horns, of course, but the human boy kept saying “antlers” so whatever – claws threatening just close enough. The irritated crooning and wing-flapping was almost worth it, before the weight settled back down. He made a face and waved his claws over his head again, feeling the pigeons settle back.  He had even tried shaking his head like a barkbeast once, but they kept sitting there. Stubborn. It was definitely uncool.  Absolutely lame.

Absolutely lame in a way only cute, feathery hitchhikers that had recently escaped _death by actual monsters_ could be.  Dammek wasn’t mad, exactly.

“Looks like the Lone Gunbirds like you,” Jude said, a little too singsong for Dammek’s liking.  Sure, the bumbling little earth-birds wanted to sit all over him and peck gently at his hair.  Sure, they cooed in a deep, soothing sort of way, which was alright.  Even if it wasn’t _quite_ soothing enough to make up for the fact that Dammek was a ridiculous distance from home, on an alien planet that didn’t even have sopor slime recuperacoons to sleep in… Even then, it had to be alright.  Didn’t make scrubbing pigeon shit off his hoodie all the time any less gross, though.  “They don’t even care for _Joey_ as much as you, friend!”

Over the last little while, Dammek had gone from thinking Jude’s energy was a sort of brisk denial – _“My earth human ‘sister’ Joey got sucked up by an unholy beam of space light, but everything’s fine!” –_ to thinking of it like a kind of weapon.  Jude had his treehouse full of quirky hobbies – he had an imposing manor full of dusty memorabilia he said belonged to something called his “Pop.”  (“Pop” was, of course, also a word for certain kinds of carbonated sugar water favored by Alternia’s dizzy, cackling murder clown elite, so that was great and not confusing at all.)  But outside of those sort of sanctuaries, the kid didn’t have a whole lot going for him. 

Jude could label knick-knack drawers and train carrier pigeon fleets all he liked, his house was still overrun with gelatinous, radioactive-looking monster things.  He and Dammek still had had to battle their way through monster hordes just to grab some canned food and mysteriously bloodless earth cereal.  They’d have to do it all over again soon, if they didn’t come up with a better plan by then. 

More than that, though, Jude’s “sister” was still probably on Dammek’s homeworld, Alternia, getting all sorts of murdered for having blasphemous, impossible human blood.  He didn’t even like to think about what all they’d do to her.  Humans were fragile, Dammek had discovered.  All their bones were on the inside. 

Nevermind the fact that if Jude was to be believed, he was _also_ currently targeted by a bunch of separate human governments for knowing a lot of high-security, conspiracy-related information.

(Dammek wasn’t completely sure Jude was to be believed, on that front.  Not that he’d said anything yet.  Just… Yeah.)

But it had all begun making a little sense.  Jude didn’t break because he didn’t slow down.  He was trying to solve everybody’s problems, always fidgeting, always adjusting his dorky giant glasses.  Always talking to his pigeons in over-the-top, goofy accents.  His energy was like a sword and shield all in one, pushing him to work and help his sister, help his new “alien pal.”  Everything.  Maybe it was still kind of a grating energy, yeah, especially when Dammek just wanted to rant at someone and then stew in homesickness for a while.  But it was better than if Jude _had_ actually been delusional.

(Of all Jude’s particular interests, his fascination with everything “alien” was definitely the weirdest to Dammek.  He’d never had anyone study his claws like Jude did, or look at individual pieces of his hair under a microscope…  He’d never had anyone stare into his eyes so intensely before, either – it had made his head swim, a little, honestly.  He hadn’t noticed how warm Jude’s own eyes were before that.  He’d never noticed how gently he touched everything, either, flitting around like one of his birds.  Jude said he was inspecting the “consistency” of Dammek’s bright yellow irises, and of course the orange eyeballs they swam in, too.  Still, even with words like “consistency” being involved…  Still.)

But as far as the birds went, Dammek was kind of done.  There wasn’t a whole ton of room to work with in Jude’s treehouse, so he had to wheel the human guy’s chair out of the way a little to get to the mirror pieces they’d broken off from “Pop’s” bathroom and liberated from his monster-infested house.  The mirror was for aim, honestly, as Dammek’s horn-antlers were kind of huge.  Gingerly, then, he plucked each pigeon off his head and stuffed it – wiggling its adorably nonthreatening claws in the air – back into the steel carriers Jude had set up for them. 

“Aw,” Jude said, as he watched the pigeons go to “bed” or whatever earth things did.  “They’re gonna miss you.”  Jude was looking through his binoculars out at the strange, hooded figures that surrounded them.  Not literally “surrounded” them – that were close by, a lot of the time?

(Their neighbors.  Jude was staring at their neighbors from a hiding spot up in the trees.  That was something else it was taking Dammek a little time to get used to.)

“So sad for them,” Dammek said, in a tone that usually made his moirail, Xefros Tritoh, kind of snicker.  “Hey, I’m going to the roof.”

“If you see the hooded figures do anything funny from up there, let me know,” Jude said, which was about as close to a “goodbye” as Dammek ever got from him.  They both knew neither of them could really _leave_. 

“’Course,” Dammek said, though he didn’t generally look at the hooded figures when he went to the roof.  No, he looked at the sky, feeling the dull earth sun soak through him and thinking about what was beyond the clouds.  That void he’d been carried through, suspended in cherry-red light.   His planet with all its problems, all its hope for eventual, healing change.  His lusus and his moirail, possibly the only people who really wanted him back as much as he wanted to _be_ back.

Jude didn’t look up, and Dammek took just a second longer glancing around the treehouse – from his spiky collar reflected in the shattered mirror-pieces they’d glued to the wall, to Jude’s barkbeast companion that was somehow _not_ a lusus.  Tesseract – the barkbeast – was asleep underneath Jude’s desk.  The human had devised a pully thing to get him up and down from the treehouse, and he was almost – almost! – okay with it by now.

Dammek told Tesseract he was a “Good Boy” on impulse – he’d heard Jude say it often enough that it seemed like kind of a ritual thing.  Then, he hopped out the treehouse window and pulled himself up through leaves and abandoned, yellowing letters Jude’s pigeons had carried during their training days and decided to drop midway.  He propped himself up on the triangular point at the very top of the treehouse, tilted his face into the sun.  His foot was resting in a little wad of pigeon poop although he didn’t know it yet.

Dammek was thinking a lot about Xefros lately.  Back home, he didn’t so much _think_ about Xefros as exist alongside him – they were two halves of the same diamond, after all.  Their music was all collaborative, equal, just like their goals for lyric-based revolution.  Dammek was usually either physically with Xefros – who was short, soft and loud, at least compared to him, often speaking up when Dammek would’ve just huffed a little to himself – or checking up on a Prongle chat with him. Earth was kind of quiet, without Xefros swinging bats at the TV or smashing soda cans against his forehead.  Yeah, quiet – and that was even _including_ Jude, with his pet birds and those near-constant neighbor and/or monster surveillance sessions.

The thing with the birds and the treehouse made Dammek think about Xefros, too.  He’d stayed over at Xefros’s place before, but only now was he really getting an idea of what it would be like to live so close to an actual growing tree fulltime.  Animals crawled in along the leaves and wandered down to inspect his food almost more often than they didn’t, for instance.  It was nice listening to the branches rustle, falling asleep, but absolute hell when one of them broke off and messed up some of Jude’s hooded figure-monitoring schematics.  Being someone’s moirail was about balancing them, about understanding them, even the stuff they didn’t completely understand about themselves.  It was kind of weird, getting to know Xefros better even from so, so far away. 

Birds got into Xefros’s hive, too, but then they mostly got chased back out again, or nudged patiently out the door with one of Xefros’s arena stickball clubs.  Dammek closed his eyes, the earth sun still bright through his shades, through his eyelids.  He thought about messaging Xefros, if his mobile husktop actually worked on earth.  Telling him about the birds, and how they were named after characters on an earth TV show about researching aliens – just like he was, now, an alien alone in a world that didn’t make any sense yet.  He’d tell him about the treehouse, too, and how he took back everything he’d ever said about Xefros’s hive being messy because of all the leaves. 

Maybe there’d be a time to talk about all that, and more weird stuff Dammek couldn’t even imagine yet.  Maybe Jude would get his Joey back, and Dammek would learn what exactly a “sister” was like.

There were so many mysteries to solve first, though.  Plans to make, and pigeon poop to scrub off…  Well, kind of off everything?  They had to get out of the treehouse and into whatever the mysterious “quest” Jude kept hinting at actually was.  But there at the very top of the treehouse, Dammek was just like the Lone Gunbirds. He waited, and tried to keep his perch.    


End file.
